Best Of 2022: Neon White Wants You To Break It By Design

For a year that’s had a lot of games delayed, 2022 has been kind of a belter year, with expertly crafted games like the obvious GOTY contender Elden Ring to the intricate narrative RPG Citizen Sleeper. But no game better exemplifies “game feel” as a concept than Neon White. It’s tight, it’s fast, it has the best soundtrack of the year. Most interestingly though, is the game’s secret goal: It wants you to break it on purpose.

If you’re unfamiliar with Neon White, let me catch you up to speed (pun very intended) on one of GameSpot’s picks for the 10 best games of the year. It’s a first-person shooter-platformer, with cards that can either be used as weapons, which you use to take down demons, or discarded as a resource for various abilities like a dash or an extra jump. You’ll want to be quick on your feet, though, because getting the fastest time possible is your main aim.

The level design is obviously one of the standout aspects of the game, because while the thing you’re doing is platforming, the game is really more like a puzzle game, as you come to understand where you need to use a weapon, or where you need to use an ability.

Completing a level within certain times nets you three things: the ability to find a gift to give to one of your companions, a player-ghost that shows your previous best time, and a hint. Each of these are paired with medals, which range from bronze to platinum.

It’s those hints that really prove how special the game is. At first glance, they just seem like a way to show you how to cut a few seconds off your time. You’ll undoubtedly be wanting to do that, as each level has its own leaderboard, and it just won’t do that TheMilkMan73 has a three-millisecond faster time than you.

So you take the shortcut, which might not even be immediately obvious as to how you achieve it. Sometimes you just need to gracefully fall from a particular high point, and sometimes you need to save a particular card to use its ability, which is where the puzzle element of the levels are really highlighted.

The hints aren’t necessarily the definitive way to get the fastest time, though; they’re more of a suggestion. Each hint acts as a mini lesson of sorts, teaching you little bits of movement tech the main paths of the levels might not otherwise do. Movement tech can only get you so far, though, and after a while, I realized what the shortcuts were truly doing–they were reframing how I viewed the levels as spaces.

Say each level is reduced to a path that winds back and forth like a snake. Most people will follow the path because there’s some kind of unwritten rule that suggests you can’t go outside of the boundaries. You take this path all the time, and you don’t think to break away from its repetitive nature, even though you’re sure there’s a better way. Then one day, you see someone just walk straight forward, ignoring the path completely, outpacing everyone without increasing their speed at all. Suddenly, the way you view this space and your ability to move through it is completely different. That’s what Neon White’s shortcuts do: They encourage you to break the rules, and subsequently the game itself.

This is where the leaderboard and TheMilkMan73 come back into play, as you’re not just able to beat them thanks to this world-altering realization, but xX_blueblur_Xx and neonredsimp, too. There’s an incredible feedback loop, where you see a record you want to beat and then spend time in the level to figure out how you can best use the geometry and tools at your disposal.

In order to beat all those rivals–who don’t even know they are such–you have to figure out that straight line in the winding path, which is a lot more obvious in some levels than others. You need to spend time experimenting–you need to kill a particular enemy, but you also need to make sure you conserve enough bullets to still be able to use the card’s ability. You start waltzing around levels like you own the place, pushing the limits of everything you have, and once you get the hang of things, you’re able to launch yourself halfway across the map in ways the devs may not have intended, even in a game all about speedrunning.

Most games in the world of speedrunning don’t put that aspect of the gaming community at the forefront, with some developers even going so far as to patch out critically important exploits. Neon White isn’t like that, though. It wants you to take your time with it, before breaking it apart into tiny little bits, and rearranging them to your liking. And it’s absolutely all on purpose.